ABSTRACT

The present study aims to examine the discourse marker (henceforth DM) okay by making use of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The objective is to investigate the multifunctional status of okay, and to examine sociolinguistic variation by taking age as the main variable. Many studies have been undertaken to describe the linguistic features of the DM okay and have demonstrated that it is susceptible to variation according to gender (Johannsen et al. 2015) and age (Stenström et al. 2002; Torgersen et al. 2011). On no occasions, however, have the multifunctional features of okay been described by accounting for sociolinguistic variation exhibited by people of all ages in spoken English. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap and examine the linguistic features and sociolinguistic variation exhibited by okay in contemporary English. The analysis reveals that there is variation in the use of okay among people of different ages and changes in apparent time. Specifically, signs of change concern the collocational profile and uses of the DM okay with the function of a response form, especially in the age group 0–14.

摘要

本研究旨在利用 2014 年英国国家口语语料库 (Spoken BNC2014)来检查话语标记（以下简称 DM）。目的是调查“okay”的多功能状态，并以年龄为主要变量考察社会语言变异。已经进行了许多研究来描述DM的语言特征，并证明它很容易因性别（Johannsen 等人，2015 年）和年龄（Stenström 等人，2002 年；Torgersen 等人，2011 年）而发生变化。然而，在任何情况下，都没有通过考虑所有人所表现出的社会语言差异来描述“okay”的多功能特征。英语口语中的年龄。本研究是一项基于语料库的调查，旨在填补这一空白，并考察当代英语中“ okay”所表现出的语言特征和社会语言学变异。分析表明，不同年龄段的人对“ok”的使用存在差异，并且表观时间也有变化。具体来说，变化的迹象涉及 DM 的搭配概况和使用以及响应形式的功能，尤其是在 0-14 岁的年龄段。